Transitional Justice as a tool for polarization in Albania

Abstract The discourse on transitional justice and coming to terms with the past following 32 years of regime change in post-communist Albania continues to cause further polarization within society. The timeline of nearly thirty years has been fueled by extreme debates and harsh statements which have resulted in the division of society in two camps of public judgment-the communists and the anti-communists. The number of studies conducted on the impact of transitional justice on democratic backsliding is quite limited, and similarly, there is a paucity of research on the correlation between transitional justice and polarization within the country. Albania’s transitional justice dynamic can be better understood by contextualizing it in terms of regime change and consolidation, which would bring significant insights. The primary objective of this paper is to concentrate on the theoretical and conceptual framework of transitional justice, and to discuss its primary differences in how it deals with the past. In the second part of the paper, a detailed analysis of the discourse of the elite will be presented, aimed at addressing the fundamental question posed in this paper, which is “to what extent has the political domain utilized TJ to polarize society”?